Of Babies and Hurricanes

It was last year around this time when wind and rain tore up our neighborhood.  In fact, it did that to just about every neighborhood from here to the east coast as we suffered the after effects of Hurricane Sandy.

In our rainsoaked state with tree limbs lying strewn about, schools and businesses were closed.  I had certainly never had school called off in the fall before!

There are just a handful of occurrences in life when time seems to stop.  Natural disasters are one, and having a baby is another.

These times when the unrelenting call of "next" for one fleeting moment takes a break cause one to think in more introspective levels than normal life affords.

What's really important?

Money?
Work?
What so and so said the other day that really irked me?
What this or that person seems to think about me?
Having more rooms in our house?

Not really.

This little 8 pound girl.  That's life.  My sweet, beautiful wife.  Her laugh, her smile, how we can just talk and talk.  That's life.  My four other girls in all their strengths, quirks, and ponies.  That's life.  My gentle God, with his way of taking my fragile self and making me feel so warm and wanted inside.  That's life.

I could go on.  My parents, my brother, my friends, the dear people I work with, the students that make me laugh and the students who open their hearts to me.  All of these make life what it is too.

Relation-ship.  Where life is made.  Why did Jesus come?  Sin?  No.  That was simply a barrier to what He was really after: relation-ship.  Why did He even make the world?  Again, relation-ship.

Let's not let the stupid, passing things of life distract us and make us think that they are the real "stuff" of life.  Instead, let's, you and me, seek life where life truly is.

Meet Celia Joy!

We got home a few hours ago so I finally was able to get a pic up of our new little lady.

it's a...

Girl! Her name is Celia Joy.  Sorry I don't know how to upload photos from my ipad.  I'll get one up here when we come home in a few days.

Celia is sleeping in Mommy's arms right now.

Baby part 2

4:33 baby born!

Baby part 1

At the hospital with baby 5 coming hopefully sometime this afternoon.  Little contractions.  Keep praying.  We've got a great nurse.

Heaven is fairy tale?

Hazel Grace, the sweet, terminally ill girl that has found love from The Fault in Our Stars. I want so much to like her. I want so much to find her inspiring. But she angers me. I should feel bad about that. I mean she's dying. But she claims she doesn't want pity. Here is just one example of many that frustrate me: Hazel loves this one book. Her dad read it and says, "It was a bit hopeless," he said. "A bit defeatist." "If by defeatist you mean honest, then I agree." "I don't think defeatism is honest," Dad answered. "I refuse to accept that." "So everything happens for a reason and we'll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions?"   I come across this thinking so frequently: if you really want something to be true, it must not be. Because you really wish there was a God, because you really long for there to be an afterlife, it must not be. Some atheists pride themselves on being so honest, so in touch with the facts and reality. Theirs is just another wishful-thinking mode too, though they don't admit it.   Some very much hope there is no God or no afterlife. Alas, that may require them to recognize some responsibility towards that God or that how they live their life now may have some effect on the next life. The "honesty" argument falls in so many places. I love my wife. But one could say, "Hey let's be honest. We are all competing organisms. My survival is my main goal. I am an evolutionary product with no inherent meaning. I am a blob of stellar material that has come to life and all I can do is maintain my miserable existence. So, I will choose to protect myself and serve myself at whatever cost it takes." And I can say, "I'm just being honest." But, here's my problem: I believe in love. Yes, I really, really want there to be a thing called love. I want it to be true that giving of myself not only blesses my wife, but also blesses my God. I want it to be true that all the love and relationships that I have built with her and my four little girls will have meaning both in this life and the next. Yes, I believe in love. Call me dishonest, if you must. I give Hazel's dad credit that he tries to hold onto some semblance of belief, though the best he can come up with is, "I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed." He seems to be trying so hard to avoid saying there is a Being who actually cares. Maybe he's afraid of being 'honest.' God (truly), I hope Hazel gets honest by the end of this book. But maybe because I really want that to happen, because I actually care enough about this fictional character to hope she finds real meaning, that must mean I believe that everything happens for a reason and we'll all go live in the clouds and play harps and live in mansions*" Honestly, I suppose I do...minus the harps, of course. *To be exact, no I don't believe everything happens for a reason, though I do believe that God can bring meaning and life out of even the greatest tragedies.  The clouds, harps, and mansions are simply a cartoon cutout of a real belief in a life that will happen after this one that will certainly be much more meaningful than comic strip versions of heaven.

 

Do I mean anything?

I'm reading two different books right now.  One is called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a fiction story about two teens with cancer who fall in love.  The other is Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former addict turned tattooed, f-bomb dropping Lutheran pastor. The differences between these two books is like oil and water.  In Fault, the main character Hazel has to carry around an oxygen tank because her lungs won't work otherwise.  She has terminal cancer.  A young cancer survivor named Gus comes to a support group meeting.  When asked his biggest fear, he responds, "Oblivion," meaning to cease to exist after death. 


Hazel tells him the following:
"There will come a time...when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything....Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught....if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

Wow.  Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it.  But then...I read a chapter in Pastrix called "Beer and Hymns."  Nadia tells the story of how her church meets in a bar to sing hymns to God each week.  However, one particular week stood out because a few days before that one guy shot and killed some 12 people in a movie theater during a midnight showing of Batman. 

Nadia considered cancelling the meeting, but instead, they did it anyway.  Here are some of her remembrances of that night.

"It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung [that night].  But then I knew.  It was defiance.

"Mary Magdalene was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated.

"Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events.  Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them).  But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death--ideas present in so much of postmodernity.  Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

"When we sang hymns to God at the bar, it sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices.  It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty--because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.

"This is the resurrected God to whom we sing.  A God who didn't say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.

"Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples.  Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.  On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid.  To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles...that death is not the final word.  To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia."

I'm not done with The Fault in Our Stars yet, but I'm hoping Hazel finds more hope than that sad "reality" that she gave to Gus.